Twerking — Miley Cyrus #WeCantStop promotional graphic soliciting fan-made twerk videos

Twerking

2009viral videoclassic

Published October 4, 2026

Twerking is a hip-shaking squat dance that grew out of Southern hip hop in the 1990s before homemade YouTube videos pushed it online around 2009. It later became a mainstream news fixture in 2013 after Miley Cyrus and a Jimmy Kimmel prank video turned the word into one of the most searched dance terms on the internet.

dance memes hip hop memes aave memes participatory video memes late 2000s memes

Overview

Twerking is a dance built around rapid hip and glute movement, usually from a low squat with the dancer bent forward. The word itself is thought to be a blend of "twist" and "jerk," possibly reworked from "footwork," and sits at the intersection of Southern hip hop, crunk, and bounce music from New Orleans1. Early rap tracks like Ying Yang Twins' "Whistle While You Twurk" and Bubba Sparxx's "Twerk a Little" put the term into recorded music well before it had a Google trend line2.

As a meme, twerking is less a single joke than a format: a short vertical clip of a dancer, often filmed in a bedroom or hallway, with the camera low and the beat loud. The humor online tends to run in two directions, either sincere showcase clips posted by dedicated dancers, or chaos edits where the dance is interrupted by a parent, a pet, or something catching fire2. By 2012, the word was so searched in Australia that it landed at number seven on Google's "how to" list for the year, even though the Google spokesperson quoted in the story admitted he had never heard of it1.

The tone shifted again once mainstream pop grabbed hold of it. After Miley Cyrus performed a routine built around the move at the 2013 MTV VMAs, blog posts, tutorials, and parody clips started treating twerking as shorthand for pop controversy rather than a regional dance3. Urban Dictionary entries from this era joke that twerking "is something that Miley Cyrus should never ever do," which captures the pop-culture whiplash fairly well4.

Origin & Background

Platform
Southern hip hop (dance origin) / YouTube (viral spread)
Date
2009

The dance predates the meme by more than a decade. Twerking circulated in Southern hip hop and crunk scenes through the 1990s, and the slang version of "twerk" was logged on the Online Slang Dictionary by a user named Brandon on April 6, 20025. Urban Dictionary followed almost exactly a year later, on April 7, 2003, with a definition from user Robin describing it as working one's body, especially the rear end4.

The online meme phase traces most directly to the Twerk Team, a group reportedly started in 2005 by three 14-year-old girls in Atlanta, Georgia2. The official OfficialTwerkTeam YouTube channel went live on June 5, 2009, and became the reference point many later articles pointed to when explaining the dance6. From there the format was less about a single creator and more about an endless feed of amateur clips, which is why the "creator" of twerking as an internet thing is best labeled as unknown rather than attributed to any one dancer or label.

How It Spread

The jump from Atlanta dance group to global search term happened over about four years. The Twerk Team's YouTube channel racked up roughly 76 million views and 258,000 subscribers in under three years, while their Twitter account passed 114,000 followers2. In September 2011, the aggregator site YouTwerk launched, pulling YouTube twerk clips into a single catalog. Reddit joined in on February 28, 2012, when the /r/twerk subreddit was created as a voting feed for twerk videos8, and a month later the Twerk Olympics Tumblr started posting curated GIFs on March 30, 2012.

2013 is when the dance stopped being a niche YouTube category and became a running news story. On June 3, 2013, Miley Cyrus released "We Can't Stop," and the following day her Facebook team announced that the music video would include fan-submitted twerking clips tagged #FanMade2. Three months later, on September 3, 2013, a YouTube user calling herself Caitlin Heller uploaded "Worst Twerk Fail EVER - Girl Catches Fire!" in which a handstand twerk ends with the dancer tipping into a table of lit candles. Within a week it passed 9.8 million views and was picked up by the Huffington Post9, the New York Post10, and E! Online, which flatly called it "the worst twerking fail ever"11.

The fail turned out to be staged. On September 9, 2013, Jimmy Kimmel aired an extended cut on his show revealing that "Caitlin Heller" was stuntwoman Daphne Avalon and that he had orchestrated the whole clip, running in at the end with a fire extinguisher. The reveal spread almost as fast as the original, with write-ups at the Daily Dot12 and The Atlantic framing it as a case study in how fast viral content can bypass basic skepticism13. Earlier that year, in March and April 2013, a far darker twerking video also went viral: a 30-second clip of a father whipping his two teenage daughters with cable after finding a twerk video they had posted to Facebook, which reportedly passed two million views on WorldStarHipHop and drove calls for child protective services14.

Timeline

2002-04-06

Online Slang Dictionary user Brandon submits one of the earliest written entries for the word "twerk"[5].

2003-04-07

Urban Dictionary adds a definition for "twerk" from user Robin, framing it as working one's body, especially the rear end[4].

2009-06-05

The OfficialTwerkTeam YouTube channel launches, becoming the reference account for twerking videos online[6].

2011-09-21

The aggregator site YouTwerk launches, cataloguing YouTube twerk clips[2].

How to Use This Meme

A typical twerking clip is short, vertical, and shot in a cramped room with the camera placed low enough to catch the full movement. Dancers usually squat, plant their hands on knees, a wall, or the floor, and bounce the hips in time with a trap, bounce, or crunk track. Common video conventions include a tight bedroom frame, a looping song clip, and a reveal, often a parent walking in, a sibling filming without permission, or in the most-shared cases, something going badly wrong on camera7.

Frequently Asked Questions